Magnetic stripe payment cards carry a magnetic stripe that contains the payment card data. Magnetic stripe payment cards include credit, debit, gift, and coupon cards, among others. The data is “written” onto the magnetic stripe by alternating the orientation of the magnetic particles embedded into the stripe. Card data is read from the magnetic stripe at a Point of Sale (POS) by swiping the card through a magnetic stripe reader. The reader includes of a reader head and its associated decoding circuitry. When the card is swiped through the reader the magnetic stripe moves in front of the reader head. The moving magnetic stripe, which contains the alternating polarity magnetic domains, creates a fluctuating magnetic field within the narrow sensing aperture of the reader head. The reader head converts this fluctuating magnetic field into an equivalent electrical signal. The decoding circuitry amplifies and digitizes this electrical signal, recreating the same data stream that was originally written onto the magnetic stripe. The encoding of the magnetic stripe is described in the international standard ISO 7811 and 7813.
With the increased popularity and capability of smartphones, there is a growing desire to use them as mobile wallets and to use them to make payments at the point of sale. The key impediment to adoption has been the lack of data transfer channel between mobile phones and the point of sale terminal. A number of alternatives have been proposed. These include the manual keying of data displayed on the phone's screen into POS terminal, 2D barcodes displayed on the phone's screen and read by a 2D barcode reader, RF ID tags attached to phones and built-in Near Field Communications (NFC) hardware driven by an application in the phone. Of these methods, 2D barcodes and NFC are the most promising. Their wide scale adoption, however, is prevented by a lack of suitable reading devices at the point of sale, and in the case of NFC, also the lack of standardized NFC capability in many smartphones.
Accordingly, there is a need for improved devices and methods for transmitting payment card data, or other information, from a smartphone, or other electronic device, remotely into a Point of Sale transaction terminal.